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Wikipedia's world view is skewed by rich, western voices

Wikipedia's world view is warped by editors in the west, with nearly half of all edits to articles about places on the encyclopedia made by people living in just five countries, a report has concluded.

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A study by Oxford University's Internet Institute found that editors in France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the US dominated the service. It also showed there were more editors in the Netherlands, which isn't even in the top ten countries by number of edits, than in the entirety of Africa.

Researchers focused on articles linked to specific locations, with longitude and latitude associated with the page, hoping to avoid regional variations in knowledge; while an article about jam, for example, could have been edited from anywhere, an article about the Peruvian village of Písac should arguably be edited by locals.

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Counter-intuitively, the study found that high-income countries had a disproportionately loud voice when it came to writing and editing Wikipedia articles about specific places. Looking at data from 708,000 articles in 44 languages spanning 12 years from Wikipedia's creation in 2001 to February 2013, the study found that high-income countries drowned out other voices. North America, for example, had 100 times more editing power than the entire of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Obviously certain countries have far greater internet access than others, but though that factor made an impact, it was not the only cause of the disparity. The researchers said a network effect, where 'bright spots' of knowledge attracted more editors than less well-known articles, was also having an impact.

The study found that editors in low-income countries were more likely to edit articles about high-income countries than their own, further skewing Wikipedia's knowledgebase. Rather than editing an article about a local town or village, someone from a low-income country would be more likely to edit an article about New York or Paris, the study's authors explained. "In practice, we see how existing inequalities and imbalances don't just make places invisible, but also suffocate certain voices and perspectives," explained Dr Mark Graham, lead author on the report. "Even those in less economically advantaged places are drawn to write online about places that are already highlighted in a bright glow of information production."

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Wikipedia's diversity problem is nothing new, nor is it limited to wealth. A 2011 survey by the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that runs Wikipedia, found that 90 percent of the site's editors were male, with nine percent female and just one percent transsexual or transgender.

But this new study into the geographical imbalance on Wikipedia further highlights bias that permeates one of the world's most popular websites. The report criticises a system of "virtuous and vicious cycles" whereby dominant voices drown out less visible parts of the world. "Even on Wikipedia, widely touted as one of the web’s most open and most inclusive platforms, we see that low-income countries are represented far less than locations that are economically advantaged," said Graham.